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Featured: Paul H. Matthews, Assistant Director, UGA Office of Service-Learning, and Academic Professional

According to Paul Matthews, assistant director of the Office of Service-Learning, the best part of his job is getting to work across campus with a very diverse group of faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and community partners to help bring them together to take on meaningful and collaborative work.

Where did you earn your degrees?
I have two degrees from UGA — both an A.B. in the honors interdisciplinary “Area Studies” major (I was a Foundation Fellow and First Honor Graduate, 1991) and a doctorate in language education (2001). I also have a master’s in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas-Austin (1994). I completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Passau, Germany after my undergraduate work.

What are your current responsibilities at UGA?
I help support and promote academic service-learning campus-wide, which primarily involves working with faculty to engage their students in using their course content to help meet real-world community needs. This includes a range of workshops and professional development consultations, applied research, teaching graduate courses and tracking and reporting institutional indicators of service-learning. I also coordinate the Public Service & Outreach Student Scholars program, which directly engages a cohort of undergraduates with the university’s public service mission.

When did you come to UGA and what brought you here?
I grew up in Athens, and first came to UGA as undergraduate because of the Foundation Fellowship Scholarship Program. I returned in 1994 to teach Spanish full-time for three years, then stayed on for my doctoral work, and was hired by the College of Education to co-direct its new Center for Latino Achievement and Success in Education. In 2010, after serving as a faculty affiliate with the Office of Service-Learning for three years, I became the Assistant Director.

What is the best part about your job?
The best part of my job is getting to work all across campus with a very diverse group of faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and community partners, and helping them come together to take on meaningful and collaborative work.

Describe your current research or service projects.
One large-scale research project that I’m excited about is that we are working with Dr. Jeff Dorfman to investigate whether taking part in service-learning courses as an undergraduate had subsequent economic benefit on UGA graduates in their employment history.

What does service mean to you?
While volunteer and community service is great (and I’m involved in both through Rotary International and the Boy Scouts of America), a big part of what our office tries to support is ensuring that the service in academic service-learning courses is not just “random” good works. Instead, such service should be carefully selected in order both to respond to a real-world, community-identified need, and to help support the academic learning objectives of the course. That way, everyone benefits!

What does it mean to you to work at a land- and sea-grant university, both personally and professionally?
Our land- and sea-grant mission means that engaging with the concerns of our broader community (locally, state-wide and internationally) is part of the DNA of our university.

Why is public service an important aspect of higher education?
We have an obligation to the people of the state, as well as the communities that we are part of, to help apply our knowledge, research and human capital to the “public good.” Additionally, when we consider how public service intersects with our other two missions of teaching and research, this opens up a whole new set of possibilities that likewise hold promise to improve the quality, breadth, and focus of our research and instruction.

What are some of the service-learning and public service opportunities for students that you are involved with?
First, for undergraduates, I coordinate the PSO Student Scholars program, an initiative of the Vice President for Public Service and Outreach that engages a cohort of about a dozen undergraduates each year with the land-grant mission and the work that the nine Public Service and Outreach units take part in. Through site visits, service projects, and a supervised, 150-hour internship, these students really get to experience the breadth, depth, and importance of what public service and outreach brings to the state and the campus, and they can then become better advocates and ambassadors for this work.

At the graduate level, we have been intentionally working on opportunities for graduate students campus-wide to develop and document their competencies in service-learning, outreach, and engagement work, especially in their roles as future faculty members. For instance, Shannon Wilder and I co-taught for the first time this spring, a new course on service-learning course design. I also help support a new Graduate Portfolio in Community Engagement, a non-credit opportunity for graduate students to document their work in engaged research, service-learning, or public service and outreach.

What is the value or benefit of students engaging in service-learning and public service?
The students themselves tell us, in our end-of-course service-learning survey each semester, that when their courses are enhanced through a service-learning activity, they learn the academic material more deeply, better understand the community and their relationship with it, gain professional skills and experiences that make them more marketable, and have a better relationship with their instructor.

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